The Old Colts (3 page)

From cowtown to city, then, from Front Street to the “Gay White Way” was for Bat a hop-skip-and-jump. The Kansas farm boy turned out to be a born New Yorker. Out there he had worn a star. Here he had star billing from the day he hit Grand Central. Out there he bullied money from a cheapskate town council. Here it came easy, from the point of a pen. Out there the price of a high old time was too often paid in death rattles, while here dollar bills did the trick. Out there, in the end, a man might be planted in a pine box on Boot Hill. Here he got a satin-lined casket and interment in green and elegant Woodlawn. And one thing for sure, along the way here he kept a hell of a lot classier company.

His company in carouse was in the main that of other newsmen. There would have been a natural affinity in any case. Bat was a man’s man, generous, outgoing, full of fun. He was the real thing, too. Soon after his arrival in Gotham the magazine
Human Life
signed him to do a series of articles on the celebrated gunmen he had known, from Clay Allison to Luke Short, from Ben Thompson to Wyatt Earp, and, when the pieces ran, even the most cynical reporter recognized the ring of truth in every line. When he went to work for the
Telegraph,
he wrote an honest column. And so his fellows welcomed him to their charmed and bibulous circle with a grin and a clap on the back and bought him a drink.

And he made marvelous copy. They knew he had actually slain only three men—Sergeant King and the assassins of his brother Ed—but it was they who pumped up the count to twenty-three on grounds that gore was a damn-sight more interesting to the reader than verisimilitude. It was they who expanded the Plunkett shootout into a front-page item. Some blowhard Coloradan by that moniker and a Texan named Dinklesheets were standing around at the Waldorf bar getting spifflicated and proclaiming that Bat Masterson was a fake and a fraud and his reputation in the West was lower than a snake’s hips. After several nights of this, Bat confronted the pair with a hand thrust into his pocket. “Look out!” someone yelled, “Bat’s going to flash his cannon!” There was a stampede for the exits, led by Plunkett and Dinklesheets, and when the shooting was over—there had been none whatever—and Bat was begged to put his cannon on public display, he smiled and pulled from his pocket a pack of Spuds.

Another reason why he was much cherished by his peers was that, since he was a newsman now, and you were a newsman, a little of his luster rubbed off on you. But for accident of birth, you might have had the adventures, you might be hustled by autograph hounds, you might be a Bat Masterson—and sometimes wished you were. Not least of all, you might be able to tell the tall tales he could. His yarns enraptured. Liarly though most might sound, they were based on experience no city slicker had ever had, and hence could not disprove.

To send cold chills up and down their spines he had only to describe in detail, for example, the killing of Levi Richardson by Frank Loving.

To make them slap their knees, he might recollect how they put a monkey in the room at the Dodge House of a drunkard drummer who had passed out, and what happened when he revived.

To split their sides, he could recall the amazing Prof. Geezler, the armless showman who wrote letters and rolled cigarettes and fired off a small howitzer with his toes, and prospered mightily until the night he had one too many before a performance in Wichita and blew off his act.

Bat could also pull his listeners’ legs right out of their sockets.

Four ayem.
He was in Jack Dunstan’s, near the Hipp on Sixth Avenue, having breakfasted with Irvin S. Cobb, star rewrite man of the
World;
Hype Igoe, sportswriter on the same sheet, who liked to bring his ukelele to Jack’s and lead the waiters in song; Wilson Mizner, playwright and short storyist who would become, in time, screenwriter and resident wit in Hollywood; Val O’Farrell, private eye and “friend” of Peggy Hopkins Joyce; Jimmy Walker, attorney and New York State Senator who even then aspired to be mayor one day; Damon Runyon of the
American;
and George M. Cohan, whose Revue had just passed a hundred performances at the Astor. They were watching a flying wedge of waiters bounce some disorderly college boys into Sixth Avenue and talking about the Sailor White vs. Victor McLaglen fight, and when Bat was asked what he would say about it in his column tomorrow, he said he had advised McLaglen to forget fighting and stick to the stage.

Just then he saw a tall man enter the place, the man in the slouch hat he had earlier encountered on 43rd Street outside the race room. Carrying the valise, the man approached the bar, pointed Bat out to a bartender, then was gone before Bat could get to the bar.

“That tall guy,” Bat said to the bartender. “What’d he want?”

“Asked me if that was you. I said it was.”

“Know ‘im?”

“Not him.”

When he returned to the table the others were drinking coffee and chewing the fat of two subjects simultaneously: the Peck murder case in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Wilson’s dawdling and inconsistent responses to Germany’s submarine warfare on neutral shipping. After a tortuous trial a doctor named Waite had that day been found guilty of poisoning the Pecks, his wife’s millionaire parents—a verdict O’Farrell had predicted—and that day, despite the torpedoing of the
Cymric,
the President had declared in a National Press Club speech that the U.S. should stay out of war in order to help Europe reinstate peace. The consensus at the table at that weary hour was that no one would ever really know whether or not Waite was guilty because the evidence was too complicated, and only events would tell whether or not Wilson was playing with all his marbles because the matter of neutral shipping in wartime was too complicated.

“Damn near as complicated as poling hogs,” opined the
Telegraph
columnist.

There was a loud pause. The other seven at the table looked into their cups and settled their butts in preparation for another masterpiece of Mastersonia.

“What in hell is poling hogs?” asked Runyon, agreeable to being straight man.

Bat lit a Spud. “Well, in the northwest corner of Arkansas—”

“Hold it,” said Igoe. “Just where is the northwest corner of Arkansas?”

“Well,” said Bat, “suppose you’re in the northwest corner of Oklahoma. To get to the northwest corner of Arkansas you go east till you smell it, then south till you step in it.”

Hype nodded.

“I’ll begin again,” said Bat. “In the northwest corner of Arkansas there’s a lot of acorn trees, and usually the boys in a family aren’t weaned until they are eighteen or twenty years old.”

They reflected.

“I don’t get it,” admitted O’Farrell, the ace detective. Jimmy Walker, attorney and state senator, drew on a stogie. “Now just a minute.” He addressed Bat like a witness. “Let’s separate these things, shall we? Why are the boys in northwest Arkansas not weaned until they are eighteen or twenty years old?”

“Because the longer they’re on mother’s milk, the taller they grow, and the taller they grow, the more money they can earn.”

They looked at each other, sinking ever deeper into the swamp, willing yet reluctant.

“Goddammit, Georgie,” said Runyon to Cohan, “I will not play straight man all the damn time. It’s your turn.”

George M. jumped out of his chair and leaned on its back. He was not a man who liked to sit when there was something going on, and something was. “All right, Bat,” he said on cue. “I have never played northwest Arkansas and never intend to, but how can the boys there earn more money the taller they grow?”

“By poling hogs.”

Bat smiled round the table as though that explained everything.

Hype Igoe strummed a discordant chord on his ukulele. “Oh my God,” he groaned, “here we go again.”

Bat took up the slack. “And the reason they can earn a lot of money poling hogs is because of the nature of the mud in Arkansas. It balls up easy, and hardens up like a brick.”

“The mud! What in hell does mud have to do with—” Damon Runyon checked himself and glared through his glasses.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Cobb reproved in his grits-and-hominy drawl. “It is no use asking questions or exercising ourselves. Let us allow Mr. Masterson to proceed in his own obfuscatory way—I am sure he will edify us to our satisfaction.”

Bat nodded a bow. “That’s right. Hold your horses, gents, and I’ll uncomplicate things. Now here’s this kid, eighteen or so, tall, still on mother’s milk and still growing. He hires himself out to a neighbor and gets a big basket and fills it full of little shoats.”

“Shoats?” This was Wilson Mizner, himself a raconteur but at the same time an urban type who would not have known one end of a pitchfork from the other.

“Little pigs.” Bat was patient. “Then he puts the basket on his head and walks around under the acorn trees and the shoats reach up and, say, don’t they gobble those acorns. And of course, the taller he is the more acorns they can reach and the more acorns they eat the faster they fatten and the more neighbors hire ‘im and the more money he makes. And that’s called ‘poling hogs.”

The seven looked at each other. Then they looked at Bat, whose face was poker. George M. sat down slowly. “But what keeps the shoats in the basket? Why don’t they jump out?”

Bat rose, frowning at the ignorance the question implied. “Because after he puts ‘em in the basket, he pulls the tail of each and every one through a hole in the basket and puts a dob of mud around the end of it.”

They gaped at him.

“The mud,” said Runyon.

“In northwest Arkansas,” said Cobb.

“Balls up easy,” said Walker.

“Hard as a brick,” said Mizner.

“Goodnight, gents,” said Bat, and strolled away humming “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?”

He stopped to tell Harry, the headwaiter, to put breakfast for everybody on his bill, but Harry shook his head.

“Sorry, Bat.”

“Sorry?”

“Jack says no more.”

“You don’t mean it.”

“You’re up to three hundred.”

“Chickenfeed.”

“That’s the limit. He says he’s a sap if he takes any more of your tickets.”

He was marching home under the rattling trestles
of the Sixth Avenue elevated and madder than a wet hen when the back of his neck told him to stop, to turn. He stopped, turned. He waited until a Pierce-Arrow passed. There he was, the tall grim outlander in the slouch hat again, lugging the valise and following him on the opposite side of the street and also stopping. They stared. This time Bat had a strange sensation. It was as though they were locked in a silent struggle for recognition. It was as though each knew the other, or had known the other, but could not make the remotest connection between the man he had known, whether friend or enemy, and the man he now perceived. And after a minute Bat gave up the effort, tipped his hat to the stranger who was not, somehow, a stranger, and went on his solitary way.

His humble abode is a three-room apartment on the second floor of a brick-backed, brownstone-fronted row house numbered 300 on West 49th Street. Designed in the Italianate style of the 1850’s, these buildings, block upon block, were once fashionable one-family residences which typified midtown Manhattan from 14th Street north to Central Park; but now, gone to seed, they have been converted to rooming or apartment houses. They are a sore to the eye and a monotony to the mind. Signs sell music lessons from windows. A bottle of milk sours on a windowsill. Garbage cans lack lids. Cats vs. rats.

Bat begins to mount the steps.

Suddenly he is rushed from the rear. He tries to turn, is struck a blow to the side of the head which sends his derby sailing and sprawls him against the balustrade of the steps.

He pushes off and flails away with both fists. There are two men: the muscular mugs who work for Grogan at the race room.

He is no match. They are pros. Heaving lefts and rights the bastards batter him down on the steps again and go to work on his ribs.

He is frightened, hurt, furious.

Footfalls, someone galloping to his rescue, and the mugs are rolled onto him like barrels of beer.

Then they are off him and cursing and mixing it with somebody else, and beaten but unbowed Bat regains the perpendicular and ups with his dukes, and just as he spots the tall man who’s been tailing him swinging away, one son-of-a-bitch does some fancy footwork and uppercuts Bat in a crude but effective manner, not unlike that of Battling Levinsky, the light-heavyweight titlist, and Mr. Masterson’s bulb goes out.

He comes to. He lies supine on the steps.
His jaw is still attached to his anatomy but his ribs ache like sin. He groans, elbows to a sit, and there beside him, hatless, gray mustache besmirched with blood, is the long drink of water who tried to help and for his pains had his own lights extinguished. He, too, has a gray roof. There is something faintly familiar about his features, which are intact—eyes deep-set, strong nose and iron jaw and big ears—but the face in sweet repose is scarcely grim. It is that of a gent getting on in years who, instead of fooling around at fisticuffs, ought to be in bed with a glass of warm milk.

He comes to, and with a haul on the balustrade sits up to groan.

“Thanks, pal,” Bat mumbles. “I could’ve handled ‘em myself, though.”

“I noticed.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“You don’t know me?”

With a grunt and another groan, Bat gets to his feet. “Not from Adam.”

“You’ve changed yourself.”

“Who says?”

“I had to have a barkeep point you out tonight.” The tall guy gets to his feet, rubs his right shoulder. “It’s been a lot of years, Bat. A lot of water under the bridge.”

Bat draws a sharp breath, which hurts his ribs. Suddenly he is rushed by recognition as he was just rushed from the rear by Grogan’s crushers.

“My God, no,” he mutters.

“Yes.”

They stand on the flight of steps before 300 W. 49th Street in New York City at five o’clock of a dawning in the year 19 and 16. They stand as though each still disbelieves in the reality of the other. It has been twenty years. They were once friends to the bone. So they look at each other as though the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese and Jesus H. Christ has just come back to earth.